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When hiring employees, conventional wisdom dictates that one
should always try and select the superstars, those men and women
who excel at their job so thoroughly they put the average human
to shame. After all, the assumption that a corporate team packed
with ten peak performers will outperform a unit that consists of
five excellent achievers and five merely good ones seems like a
safe bet.

But while top-tier talent is clearly a must-have for any
business, a recent study published in
Psychological Science adds a shade of
nuance to the talent equation by suggesting that when it comes
to team performance, there may be a talent-saturation point.

In a series of experiments, researchers at Columbia University
and other institutions picked apart the relationship between
talent and team performance in sports by examining professional
athletes playing in the National Basketball League, Premier
League and Major League Baseball. To identify elite players, the
researchers used a set of criteria in each league – in the
NBA, for example, players were ranked via their Estimated Wins
Added, a statistic used to approximate the number of
victories a player adds to a team’s season total above what a
'replacement player' would produce, along with whether or not
they were selected for the league's annual All-Star tournament.
Meanwhile, in the Premier League, elite players were chosen by
cross-referencing national teams with powerhouse club teams, such
as Real Madrid and Chelsea; those who appeared on both lists were
considered superstar talent.

For all three sports, the researchers calculated the percentage
of 'elite' players' on each team, and then compared that number
to the team's overall performance (measured by its win-loss
record).

The results varied by sport. In baseball, the more talent the
better: Team performance continued to improve as the percentage
of elite players on a team climbed.

But in basketball and soccer, this steady upward trend didn't
hold – instead, the researchers found that while the addition of
talent was initially beneficial to a team's performance, there
was a saturation point. Once a team's ratio of elite players to
non-elite ones surpassed approximately 2:1, returns began to
diminish. Not only that, but basketball and soccer teams with the
highest percentage of top athletes had, on average, worse
win-loss records than teams with a more mixed roster.

The study's authors chalk this difference up to the inherent
difference in baseball's style of play versus soccer and
basketball's: "Prior research suggests that baseball involves
much less task interdependence among team members, compared with
football and basketball," they wrote.

In other words, basketball and soccer are quintessential team
sports, where success depends on players' ability to work as a
cohesive unit, while baseball is more about individual
performances.

"Our findings reflect the disappointing fact that teams of
superstars often fail to live up to expectations," the authors
explain. They're talking about sports teams, but their finding
can be extrapolated to include any unit that needs to function as
a well-integrated whole. Or, as the researchers explain it:

"Just as a colony of high performance chickens competing for
dominance suffers decrements in overall egg production and
increases in bird mortality, teams with too much talent appear to
divert attention away from coordination as team members peck at
each other in their attempts to establish intragroup standing."

In other words, too many top-tier employees can cause a team's
performance to suffer as high-performance individuals jockey for
position within the group. Instead, the authors advise,
team-builders should consider pairing high-flying over-achievers
with a solid percentage of competent, if not exceptional,
workers.

"In many cases, too much talent can be the seed of failure," the
study concludes.